If you ask me, when it comes tools for writing automated build scripts nothing packs more bang for the buck than Rake. Until recently, using Rake to build .net solutions required a magic concoction of hacked together scripts which rarely exhibited Ruby’s appreciation for beauty nor Rake’s spirit of simplicity. Luckily our buddy Derick Bailey decided it was time to bite the bullet and start building some real Rake tasks that were special suited for building .net code. The result is Albacore. Using Rake for .net IRL I’ve been using Rake to be lazy for a while. And we, the VersionOne dudes &...

We recently ran into an issue where upon pulling some new 3rd party dependencies into our product our CI pipeline broke! I when I say broke, I mean it came to a screeching halt! We were totally unable to compile in Release mode due to the new dependencies not being strongly named and signed. The error message in the build log was CSC : error CS1577: Assembly generation failed -- Referenced assembly 'MvcContrib.FluentHtml' does not have a strong name Sign it yourself! Eric Hexter, of the MvcContrib team,...

The recent series of Day of .Net events have been a bit atypical of most other Microsoft related conferences/events - at least historically speaking. The biggest difference I've seen? The decreasing number of "Hurray for the latest golden hammer handed down by our Redmond overlords" sessions. Instead, most sessions have focused on practices, principles, and tooling decidedly not driven nor delivered by Microsoft. They come from a more organic source - a community of developers seeking to continuously improve ourselves and our craft. What community? Some members of the community might gather under the ALT.NET banner,...

My local .NET developers group has been a loosely run non-organization since its inception. And yet, we’ve flourished. Right now the average attendance is around 50-60 people per meeting. But we’ve we outgrown our training wheels and it’s time to step up and officially get organized. CONDG (con-dug) Central Ohio .NET Developers Group This past week we officially filed the necessary paperwork to become a non-profit organization. Chairman of the Board Myself along with three of the other current leaders of the group were asked to serve as...

Events and delegates aren’t exactly a new concept in the .net world. I might even go so far as to say that they are fairly well understood by most experienced .net developers. That’s not to say the concepts behind them are easy to grok... I’m just saying that if you know developer who’s been around the .net-block a few times, he/she probably has a pretty good grasp of what a delegate is and how they’re used. Am I such a developer? Up until yesterday I thought I was. Here’s the scenario I found myself in: I...

Simone Chiaretta recently posted an overview of a recent Ajaxian poll that sought to determine the state of of AJAX usage among developers in the enterprise... whatever that means. :) Not happy with the lack of detail, Simone did a little number-crunching of his own to determine the usage among developers using the .net stack. He found that among the 381 developers using .net, roughly 36% of them are using Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX framework/implementation. Gettin' particular Taking it even further, Simo has now created his own survey targeted directly at .net developers. He’s used the same...

Last night I finally took the time to watch the ScottGu and ScottHa presentations on the new MVC framework that Scott first mentioned back in March at the MVP Summit. First let me say that I’m really excited about this move, especially with my good buddy Phil at the helm. But I’m also excited because being the pragmatic developer that I try to be, I realize that much of the world only eats what it’s fed from Microsoft†. That being the case, I’m for any move that will help the large number of developers out there who are stuck...

I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read James' response to Phil’s Tweet regarding the recently announced open sourcing of parts of the .net code base. It went like this: Phil : Remember, "Open Source" is a trademark owned by the OSI. .NET is not open sourced, it’s being shared. James : I think shared might not be right either, more like shown. I am not sharing my ice cream with you if I just let you look at it. :) Open Source explained for the...

One of the things I’m most excited about with Visual Studio 2008 is it’s ability to target various versions of the .net framework, a feature known as multi-targeting. I recently rebuilt a (hand-me-down) laptop for use at developer group meetings, conferences, and coding from the couch. When building out the machine I decided to only install VS2008 and make use of multi-targeting to work on my various .net 2.0 projects... like Subtext. Today I finally got around to loading Subtext up in VS2008 and I was expecting some heartache. But I did a little research first and...

Phil recently wrote about some of The Most Useful .NET Utility Classes Developers Tend to Reinvent Rather Than Reuse - an article chock full of tasty tips, tricks, and reminders about [.net] framework features you forgot (or never knew) existed. One of the utility classes Phil mentioned was the System.Web.HttpUtility class. Two of the super useful methods this class offers are UrlEncode and UrlDecode... used to uh, convert a string into a URL encoded string and decode a URL encoded string, respectively. Do you encode? All web developers, regardless of language/platform, should be intimately familiar with the basic encoding schemes...